Episode 137: Talking about Angels in the Bible

The truth is that we know more about angels on TV and in Christian art than we do about angels in the Bible, and so before we dive into our first real encounter with angels in Genesis 19 we’re going to see what the Bible does and doesn’t say about Angels. And we’ll talk about the three most famous angels of all!

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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler! Welcome to this week’s episode of Context for Kids, where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel, where I usually post slightly longer versions. All Scripture this week comes from the MTV, the Miss Tyler Version, which is the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) tweaked a little or a lot to make the context and the content more understandable for kids.

Since two angels showed up with God on Abraham’s doorstep (okay, he didn’t have a doorstep), before we get into Genesis 19 we need to talk about angels and messengers and men because sometimes it can be hard to know what we are dealing with in the Bible and the same word is used to describe messengers who are human and messengers who are angels! Hebrew isn’t like English where we have a ton of different words, and a lot of Hebrew and Greek words can’t be translated or understood by just using a dictionary definition. We have to look at the whole verse and sometimes even the whole chapter to know what they mean this time—and the next time we see the word, it might mean something entirely different. If you are confused, then you are not alone because grownups have to figure this stuff out too. And different Bibles use different English words too—which is why some Bibles say angels and others say messengers. It sure isn’t easy translating Bibles—not just anyone can do it. Maybe someday you will be a language expert and you can do it but not me, nope, I couldn’t translate anything if my life depended on it. We all have different parts to play in serving God, and I am so grateful that some people are really good at understanding other languages because otherwise I wouldn’t know what the heck is going on.

The Bible has a lot to say about angels, but it’s very mysterious and confusing. It’s not like there is a chapter totally devoted to angels just talking about them like a high school biology book. We have to filter through the entire Bible for clues—which means that unless someone knows the Bible really well, they probably have a lot of wrong ideas about angels. And to make things even worse, outside of the Bible there are even more beliefs about angels that have nothing at all to do with the Bible. Maybe you’ve heard that people become angels after they die, or that angels all have wings, or that there are angels who look like little babies who fly around in February, shooting people with mini-arrows and making them fall in love. When I was younger, but still a grownup, there were TV series like Touched by an Angel and Highway to Heaven, making it even more confusing. It’s hard to separate what the Bible says from what we see on TV, in movies, from legends, or in books. And that wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it makes what we see in the Bible confusing. And sometimes we picture things in our minds that have nothing to do with what the Bible says. Genesis 19 is the first time we see angels in the Bible actually called angels, and we see them as normal-looking men who have messenger jobs—which means that they are doing jobs for God here on earth, either delivering messages or checking things out. We will see angels doing other things too—like fighting battles and saving people. Really, an angel’s job is whatever God tells them to do. Sometimes angels are in disguise, and sometimes they aren’t—and when they aren’t, they are really scary-looking, and we have to be told not to be afraid. And when we look at some of the things people wrote about angels outside of the Bible, we can see some pretty wacky ideas that came from their time in exile in Babylon!

First of all, I want you to know that we aren’t going to talk about the Angel of the Lord because that’s different from ordinary angels—the Angel of the Lord is God somehow, but I really don’t understand it totally. Regular angels are heavenly beings, meaning they live where God is and they can see God and talk to Him and get orders from Him and all that jazz. We know from the Bible that angels were created to be angels by God. When people die, they don’t become angels. People who are dead are still people and when Jesus comes back and they come alive again, they will still be humans but with perfect bodies that can’t get sick and die anymore. Although Jesus said that we will be like angels when we die, because we won’t be getting married, being like something isn’t the same as being that thing. For example, I am like Taylor Swift because I am a woman, but that’s where it ends. So, we are like but not like angels. In fact, angels are superior to us—they live forever once God creates them unless God ends their lives and so they are smarter and wiser and know a whole lot more than we ever will. The word angel is really just a job description for these heavenly creatures. We get the word angel from the Greek word angelos, and the Hebrew word is malakim, but those words both mean the same thing—messenger. That’s where it can get confusing because angelos and malakim, messengers, can also be human beings, so we have to read what the Bible says to know when we are dealing with an angel from Heaven or a human being carrying a message as a messenger or a priest or a prophet. In the book of Revelation, at the end of the Bible, the writer is sending messages to the “angels” of seven churches in modern-day Turkey. Are those angels humans or from God? It doesn’t say but it could be both, although since they are seven letters, it sounds like they should be humans—not like angels need letters from humans, right? And angels deliver messages from God and not from people.

Depending on where we are in the Bible, there are different names given to God’s angelic messengers. Sometimes they are called ministers, or Daniel calls them watchers, or hosts and mighty ones when they are fighting angels, and mediators. But in the end, no matter what they are called, they all have the same job—which is to do whatever God tells them to do. But angels aren’t robots—they have what we call free will which means that they can decide to say no. And there are stories in the Bible about angels who said no and who even went to war against God and got chucked out of heaven. We’ll talk about that more later. Angels aren’t as much trouble as we are but they can still be rebellious and get themselves into trouble. Not so much like in the movies—those angels can be kinda hopeless and silly like in It’s a Wonderful Life. Angels have very important jobs other than carrying around messages—some are part of God’s heavenly council, and they listen to God make plans and even offer suggestions for what He can do. Sometimes, God even asks for volunteers for jobs—like when He needed someone to trick an evil king by telling his false prophets what the King wanted to hear instead of what His true prophet was saying—because the king wasn’t listening to him! Sometimes, God needs an army to protect His people from invading armies and He sends angels. And because human soldiers can’t kill angels, that’s a super bad deal for the human soldiers. If you ever saw the last movie of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, they had a ghost army in it that no one could fight because they were already dead, but angel soldiers aren’t dead. Which is good because that would be totally gross and scary if that could actually happen—which it can’t. Sometimes, though, we see angel armies fighting against the armies of Satan—mysterious creatures called demons. That makes the fighting very difficult—the angel in charge of God’s armies is named Michael. The angel who seems to be in charge of the super important messages is named Gabriel. And that’s another important thing because not all angels are the same—some seem to be bosses over the others.

Although angels don’t have human bodies, the Bible shows us times when they disguise themselves as human beings—like in Genesis 18 when the two angels were traveling with God, and they were all pretending to be human travelers. Lot’s not even going to notice that they aren’t human until things get really ugly and dangerous. And they are very fast—because the first thing we will notice about the angels in chapter 19 is that they traveled somewhere between eighteen and forty miles from Abraham’s camp in Hebron all the way down to Sodom in just a few hours. That’s super-fast.

Not everything we would call an angel is actually the same thing—we are mostly used to angels disguised as people in the Bible and sometimes they are wearing white robes when people see them in visions but there are also other created beings in heaven. Cherubim and Seraphim are created beings that we find around God’s throne and protecting Eden from invaders. And they are scary looking, lemme tell you. The Cherubim aren’t those chubby little baby angels with bows and arrows shooting cartoon characters in the butt to make them fall in love. Nope, you wouldn’t ever want to see one because you’d be scared to death. I mean, they are guarding God’s special places and so you wouldn’t want them to not be scary, right? They have two or four wings with hands under their wings and the sound they make when they are flapping their wings is just deafening and they also have cow hooves for feet. And they have eyeballs all over their bodies and four faces—a human face, an eagle face, a lion face and the face of an ox, which is like a bull (a male cow) but bigger and used for pulling plows and heavy farming stuff. You see one of these guys and you will definitely need to change your underwear. Ain’t nobody trying to get past them and especially when they have swords, okay? But I don’t think they actually need swords if they look like that. If you are brave enough to mess with those guys then a sword isn’t going to scare you either.

We don’t know nearly as much about the Seraphim, except that they have six wings and seem to maybe be on fire—but that’s debatable. They used two wings for flying, two for covering their faces (because God is so holy that they can’t look at Him), and two covering their feet but sometimes in the Bible when it talks about covering or uncovering your feet it means putting on or taking off whatever is covering your private parts. Covering your feet was a funny way of saying you were going to the bathroom! Because, otherwise, I have no idea why they would need to cover their actual feet with their wings unless they had super gnarly, dirty toenails. One thing that angels, cherubim, and seraphim all have in common is that they all praise God, a lot. They sing about how wonderful God is and they don’t seem to ever get tired of it and because their bodies aren’t like ours their throats probably don’t even get sore. Do you like to sing? I love to sing. Singing to God forever sounds like a great job to me. I bet that none of them are tone deaf or sing flat or sharp.

When we get to the Psalms and even in Deuteronomy, we find out that when God made all the different languages at the Tower of Babel to keep the people in Shinar from building that huge thing that was so small that God couldn’t see it without going down to look at it—which is just one of many hilarious jokes hidden all over the Bible—well, Moses and the people who wrote the Psalms said that God gave seventy angels the responsibility to guide and watch all of those new nations. They were supposed to watch over the people because God wanted to save them all but when the people started worshiping those angels as gods, the angels didn’t do anything to stop them. Which is, you know, really bad but that is just one of the ways where angels are like us—we can all decide to do the right thing or the wrong thing. And these guys were just not thinking straight. No way was this going to work out okay! Daniel talked about how the archangel Michael was busy trying to fight one of these angels just to get a message through to Daniel after he prayed! Daniel called that angel the Prince of the Kingdom of Persia. And it took Michael, the head of all God’s armies, three weeks to get through so you know this wasn’t a person who was a prince but a very powerful angel. You know, it’s hard to understand why anyone who was that close to God could do such a thing, right? But it is easy to want to be worshiped.

But as for normal angels, in addition to the jobs we have already talked about, we see that they also patrol the earth like policemen, looking for things to report back to God. And we might ask ourselves, “but doesn’t God know everything?” And although I think He does, He also likes to have others make themselves useful. I mean really, God doesn’t actually need us to do anything because He could just do everything Himself but He doesn’t. And we don’t know why. There isn’t anything that we can do or the angels can do that God can’t do Himself but part of how He likes to work seems to be involving others. God is very social, and He likes to do things as a community. I think that’s really cool that God, who is so powerful, likes for all of us to be useful and to feel needed. That makes us a lot different from the animals because we can do things that really matter, even though we can also choose to do things that are very terrible. God values what we do and that’s why He gives us specific gifts—and the same with angels. And there are probably types of angels that aren’t even mentioned in the Bible because humans don’t come in contact with them. The universe, after all, is a huge place—which brings me to how Jewish beliefs about angels changed over time and especially after the exile.

When we see angels in the Old Testament, they look like men and they work carrying messages, fighting God’s battles, praising Him, and all that. But after the Jewish people came back from their exile in Babylon, some of them began to write fiction—and fiction is stories that aren’t true but are entertaining and tell us what people were thinking at a certain time about different things. Many of these stories are about angels and they are really imaginative. It seems as though they took what the Bible says about angels and mixed it together with the beliefs of the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks—just everyone who was boss over their people for five hundred years. You see, whenever you are part of a culture—and that’s our context—ideas rub off on you. If you go into a Christian bookstore in most of America, you will see art and figurines of angels who are mostly white with long blonde hair and blue eyes—which is odd because why would angels have recessive genes? Hey, high schoolers, figure that one out for me please.  And they have huge wings, and they are mostly women. That’s how our culture sees angels here in America and it is very different from what we see in the Bible where they all look like guys without wings, and I am betting they were all brown-skinned with brown hair and brown eyes so that they looked normal to the Bible people. Lemme tell you that blonde, white, blue-eyed angels walking around would have been super freaky. And yes, people were usually scared when angels appeared to them, but no one talks about how they looked so we have to assume that apart from being spectacular as angels, they would have been considered normal.

Ancient Israelites had some kinda wacky beliefs about God before the exile—which is why they worshiped other gods and goddesses too. Even though God told them not to they did it anyway. It seems like they figured God was the boss of all the gods and it was okay with him if they also worshiped the mother goddess Asherah, and Ba’al whom they thought was responsible for giving them rain, and Dagan who they figured gave them lots of wheat and barley to eat. Now, after they came back from Babylon, they never did that again and they knew there was only one God but some of them found another way to believe the almost exact same thing—and they wrote stories about how angels were doing all those jobs instead and because they were angels, they didn’t need to be worshipped and couldn’t be worshiped. And so, in these stories that were written in Greek and Aramaic, they came up with ideas about what they thought Heaven was like and what things looked like wherever God is at with the angels working behind the scenes. So, you have angels who are in charge of these warehouses where they store up the snow, the rain, and the wind. And they gave them fancy names like Uriel, Samlazaz, Araklba, Rameel, Kokablel, Tamlel, Ramlel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael, Sariel, and many, many others. Of course, different people wrote the different stories at different times and in different places and so the list of names they gave to the angels never matched up with each other, or their jobs either. But it was okay because people understood they were writing “what if” stories.

But these make-believe stories were incredibly popular—like the Left Behind series of books when I was in my twenties, and so they influenced the way people saw things and thought about angels even when those stories didn’t line up with the Bible and usually didn’t. But they weren’t written to go into the Bible. It was a form of story-telling about things that were important to them, and nothing was more important to them than the Bible. All people from all times have come up with imaginative stories—not everything the Jews wrote about ended up in the Bible because they came up with fun stories just like everyone else does. I remember once I was talking to someone who believed these were stories that were inspired by God, and I had to tell them that they were meant to be fiction and that Jews sometimes wrote fiction and the person asked me, “why would they do that” and I answered, “why wouldn’t they write fiction? It’s what all humans enjoy!” The important thing was that they knew the difference between their stories and their Bible and didn’t confuse the two.

If you talked to Americans today about what angels are like, they would probably give answers based on what they see in books, movies, TV, and art. Because that’s our culture. If they are my age, they probably watched the TV shows Highway to Heaven and Touched by an Angel, and hopefully, they would know that there is a difference between the Bible and entertainment. But if they don’t, when they read the Bible, they might be adding things into what they see in their head that just aren’t there in the story. We’ve talked a lot about that sort of thing going on with stories about Nimrod and Melchizedek that have nothing to do with the Bible or with history! And the stories mostly disagree with one another anyway. Angels have always been incredibly popular in stories all over the world because we are all fascinated by the idea that there are invisible helpers all around us and sometimes things happen that we can’t explain without angels. Angels make us feel better, and safer, and especially when Jesus goes around telling the grownups that the angels who watch over little children are always very close to God!

And here’s where we get to something confusing. The Old Testament, the Hebrew part of the Bible, doesn’t talk about demons. But by the time of Jesus, they are getting talked about a lot. What are demons and where do they come from? Are they angels who went bad? And what about Satan? Is he really a fallen angel? There are as many stories out there about Satan and demons as angels—they just aren’t as popular in wall art for nurseries and bedtime stories. Like angels, we don’t have a whole lot of information and so just like everything else in the Bible from Nimrod to Melchizedek, when there isn’t a lot of information, people like to make things up for fun. So, we don’t know for sure if they were actually angels. But there is a very famous angel that we hear a lot about once Jesus starts to preach—and that is Satan. In fact, Jesus says that He was watching when Satan was cast down from heaven and that, as the devil, he is the father of lies because all lies come from him. The word Satan comes from the Hebrew word that means accuser—someone who is always a tattletale, only worse—and devil comes from the Greek word diabolos which means slanderer—someone who is always taking smack about other people and disrespecting them.

And so we have to think that Satan, the devil, was once one of the angels guarding the Garden in Eden and not really a snake at all. Which is why he could talk which makes much more sense. And he was in the Garden and that didn’t worry the man or the woman and so maybe he belonged there. The prophet Ezekiel (Chapter 28) talks about a guardian cherub who was in the Garden who became wicked and even violent so he was tossed out. That sounds like what Jesus was talking about, right? And, of course, He saw it because He has always been with God and part of God and God and all that theological stuff. But that’s good news for us because it means that Satan isn’t like God. Satan was just another created angel and so he can die just like any other angel. And he can also be beaten, which is what Jesus did when He died and went after him.

I love you. I am praying for you. Angels are super interesting but understanding them takes a lot of study and research and a lot of getting rid of the ideas in our heads from tv, movies, books, and the art down at the Christian bookstore!